The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

My latest Newsbud video looks at signals from Secretary of Defense Mattis' trip to Asia and what it means for the South China Sea, East China Sea, and North Korea flashpoints.

For now, Trump Asia policy looks pretty mainstream.

One point I make in the piece is that Trump isn't necessarily eschewing bloody American military mischief; he's just keeping its focus on the Middle East, rejecting the Obama promise to "pivot" militarily out of the Middle East and into Asia.

And it looks like he's decided that the politically most advantageous US security play is 1) anti-radical Islam (pleases his base) and 2) anti-Iran (pleases Saudi Arabia and Israel and freezes the Democrats).

What seems to be on the horizon is a "whack Iran" anti- radical Islam strategy that avoids tussling with Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries, and will fund and enable and empower Sunni militants in the Iran side of the patch even as JSOC tries to whack Sunni militants elsewhere in the Middle East.

I don't think that is going to solve the radical Islam problem, but I guess that's not the point of this geopolitical and political exercise.

Anti-Iran strategy inevitably raises the China sanctions conundrum and Trump and China will both be walking a tightrope when the Iran situation heats up.

Watch my piece for an interesting discussion on the MEK Iranian emigre
group as, it seems to me, a stalking horse for KSA and Israeli
agitation to derail the Iran agreement.

The MEK has lavishly rewarded US political and military figures across the
political spectrum, and I wonder if their largess—and the willingness of US
political figures to affiliate themselves with a rather fringe group—is related
to Saudi and/or Israeli sponsorship.

US supporters of the MEK who wrote a public letter to Trump urging
renegotiating the Iran deal includee General James Jones (previously Marine
Corps commandant and National Security Advisory), Robert Joseph (the neocons’
neocon), two ex-governors of Pennsylvania (Rendell and Ridge), Joseph
Liebermann (Israel’s reliable defender in Congress), Louis Freeh (ex-FBI
director), Michael Mukasey (ex-Attorney General), and so on.

Given the support that Iran can muster from Europe, Russia, and China, it seems unlikely that Trump will take a military swing directly at Iran. And I think Trump, who had the good sense to avoid a land war in Asia in his youth and has excoriated the US blunder into Iraq, is less than interested in trying to take down Iran with a military attack right now.

That means more bad times for Yemen, I think, as a weak and vulnerable opponent for an American president looking to make a geopolitical statement--and pump up his Commander in Chief credential.

Yemen is a war crime that should be shut down, in my opinion.

But it doesn't look like it will happen.

The extent to which Yemen's Houthis are now characterized as Iranian proxies, not just by the White House team but also by the Beltway security establishment, is a sorry sign that the US will probably continue to enable and abet Saudi Arabia's brutal and futile Yemen war, perhaps as a placeholder and justification for more direct anti-Iran military action later.

Thursday, February 09, 2017

Afghanistan, as a crossroads of empire and a key stage in
the Silk Road, is dotted with important archaeological sites that go back 5000
years and can provide insights into the evolution of civilizations across Asia
and, in fact, civilization itself.

Most of these sites are beyond the reach of the Afghan
government’s woefully underfunded archaeology department, and within the grasp
of the Taliban and other banditti, who either destroy or loot and sell the
precious pre-Islamic artifacts depending on their iconoclastic or economic
priorities.

Fortunately, an important Afghan archaeological site, Mes
Aynak, resides within a compound defended by 1500 Afghan troops and
administered by a prosperous and capable international entity.

Unfortunately, Mes Aynak also sits on one of the world’s
largest copper deposits, one that the Afghan government has leased for 30 years
in a contract with two major Chinese transnational companies, the Metallurgical
Corporation of China (MCC) and Jiangxi Copper.

Development of the open-pit mine means that sooner or later
the archaeological site at Mes Aynak will disappear into the maw of MCC’s
bulldozers and buckets.

A film by a Northwestern University professor and
documentarian, Brent Huffman, “Saving Mes Aynak” has gone a long way into
alerting international opinion as to the urgency and importance of preserving
the site.It’s available for streaming at
Netflix.The link is here.

Unfortunately, saving Mes Aynak appears to be a daunting
task, one that involves taking on the Afghan government and even the United
States, as well as China.

The Mes Aynak copper bonanza is seen by the Afghan
government as a vital source of revenue.Per the announced contract, the Chinese side will pay a bonus of over half a billion
dollars when the mine commences commercial operations, a big chunk considering
Afghanistan’s total GDP is only $7 billion.The United States sees income from the mine as an important step in
weaning the Afghan government off its reliance on foreign aid (like Southern
Sudan, the Kabul government is a foreign-aid state, with 72%
of its budget coming from overseas sources).

The Afghan government is unambiguously eager to see
construction at the mine begin.It
appears the collection of several hundred photogenic artifacts that survived
the looters (the site was discovered in the 1960s and only secured in 2008 when
the Chinese perimeter went up) for preservation and display at the national museum
has exhausted the government’s interest in Mes Aynak’s archaeological angle.

The United States government, which provided a million
dollars of military funding for the archaeology work, now also maintains a
studied indifference to Mes Aynak.Brent
Huffman told me he contacted the US embassy in Kabul repeatedly for interviews,
but was rebuffed.

The Chinese are usually cast as the heavies in these sorts
of scenarios and saving Mes Aynak from destruction “by a Chinese copper mining
company chasing corporate profits” is the hook for the Indiegogo fundraising
campaign.MCC and Jiangxi Copper also
receive a certain amount of stick in Huffman’s documentary as corrupt,
indifferent, and not too good at running a copper mine, which occasioned some resentful
pushback in Global Times.

However, the Chinese seem to be the ones dragging their feet
on digging up the site.

China’s reticence about ripping up Mes Aynak perhaps has
less to do with its love of archaeology than the fact that the copper project
is more of a geostrategic placeholder for PRC rather than an economic
opportunity.Copper prices have
collapsed since the deal was signed in 2007, and spending hundreds of millions
of dollars to transform Mes Aynak from a windswept waste into a world class
industrial and export center is probably not the highest priority for MCC and
Jiangxi Copper.

Add to the practical difficulties of the site the fact that
the area, although only forty kilometers outside of Kabul, is controlled by the
Taliban.Recently the Taliban, much to
the resentment of the Afghan government and, perhaps, in response to some
financial outreach from China, announced they would “protect” Mas Aynak instead
of shelling it and occasionally murdering people on the road leading to the
site.

The Chinese government, as opposed to MCC and Jiangxi, can
regard Mes Aynak primarily as control over an economic lifeline of the Afghan
government—and a pre-emptive move blocking other interested parties, like the
United States and India—that provides effective leverage for China in Afghanistan
and reach in Central Asia, a region seen as key to the PRC’s national security.

The PRC allegedly paid a $30 million bribe to Afghan
officials to secure the concession and dribbles out “signing bonuses” progress
payments, so the lease agreement remains valid—and the expectation of a $500
million payday at the start of commercial operation, realistic or not, might be
enough to keep the Afghan government on the hook even as the deal drags on.At the same time, China is demanding a
renegotiation of royalty terms and faults the overwhelmed Afghan government for
failure to execute its population relocation, infrastructure, landmine removal,
and matching resource commitments.

It is a point of interest whether MCC resents the furor over
the archaeological site, or welcomes it as another excuse to let the project
and renegotiations drag on to the frustration of an increasingly anxious Afghan
government.

So Mes Aynak sits there, with a contingent of MCC engineers
residing and working or not working in neatly built blue and white portable
structures.

The construction hiatus should provide a golden opportunity
for archaeologists to excavate and document the site but it isn’t happening.

It seems rather absurd that this well-protected, accessible,
and important site should not be the object of intensive archaeological
efforts.

Archaeological work started in 2010, was supposed to be
finished by 2013, wasn’t, and limps along amid widespread indifference by the
copper-centric interests.In 2013, the
Afghan government claimed
75% of the excavation work was complete, which doesn’t quite jibe with the
estimate in Huffman’s film that 90% of the site remained to be excavated as of
2014.

For Afghan archaeologists, their work at Mes Aynak is
hampered by government disinterest, lack of funding, and mortal peril from the
Taliban.As Huffman’s film documents,
the World Bank, for whom Mes Aynak is a key Afghan project, allocated
millions of dollars for archaeological work, but virtually none of that
money has found its way into the hands of the people actually doing the work.

Beyond the various actors pushing for rapid development of
the mine, Huffman speculates that the usual suspects in international art and
archaeological preservation work—like the Getty Trust, which has made
preservation and even duplication of another key Silk Road site, the Dunhuang
caves in western China, a showcase for its conservation efforts—shy away from
Mes Aynak to avoid offending the PRC.

Today, only a skeleton crew works Mes Aynak when the weather
permits.

Based on his information
from Afghanistan, Huffman tells me he fears that the archaeological site
is at
imminent risk of destruction now that the Taliban has shifted from
threatening
the copper project to—supposedly—protecting it. If the PRC indeed cut a
deal with the Taliban it is perhaps an ominous sign that MCC is gearing up to proceed with development of the mine.

Huffman asks interested parties to petition the Afghan
government to declare Mes Aynak a protected site.He also urges support for the Afghan
government’s beleaguered Department of Archaeology, now run by Qadir Temori,
the young man who serves as a focus for Huffman’s documentary, with the
unfortunate caveat that any financial or material assistance that isn’t
hand-carried to Kabul by Huffman will probably vanish.

The “Get
Involved” page at the Saving Mes
Aynak website offers several suggestions and opportunities to participate in
the effort to preserve the site.There
is also a contact form on
the site for anyone seeking to contact Huffman and his team.

Let’s hope the world will get to see more wonders and
knowledge emerge from Mes Aynak, not just copper.

Thursday, February 02, 2017

Over the last month, I’ve been busy making videos for
Newsbud, the indie news outfit run by Sibel Edmonds.Don’t be a free media leech! Go to
newsbud.com, view my stuff, retweet it, and pay a few bucks and become a
member!

My most recent Newsbud video keyed off the CCTV New Year’s
Gala to make some points about CCP ideology and strategy.Watch it!Don’t make me ask again!

As a reward for watching the video and reading this post, at
the end I explain the mysterious reference to “the dragon”.*

The gala’s musical numbers are BigBIGBIG! With the exception
of the feed from the Shanghai satellite which, quite frankly, was kinda lame.The centerpiece attraction for the Shanghai number
was a reprise of the Ringling Brothers warhorse EIGHT MOTORCYCLISTS IN THE
GLOBE OF DEATH!!

On the other hand, now that Ringling—a destination for
dozens of Chinese acts over the decades—has shut down, I hope circus performers,
not just Chinese but also foreigners—like the Ukrainian contortionist who
popped up in the last hour of the telecast—will find rewarding employment at
the Chinese New Year’s gala.

But I wondered if Jiang Zemin’s Shanghai gang wasn’t
interested in putting its shoulder to the wheel bigly for Xi Jinping’s
propaganda/softpower jamboree.

No such reticence at the satellite venue at Liangshan, in Sichuan,
home of the PRC launch site at Xichang where those Chinese rockets go up and
sometimes, unfortunately come down, with
horrific consequences.(Interestingly,
now the PRC considers Hainan secure enough to move its main geosynchronous
launch operations down there and Xichang is shifting into a backup role).

I must say I had my kneesocks knocked off by this number.You might want to put this on
the big screen TV and crank it. Full screen on the PC at the very least. Or, if you're watching on a phone, put your eye real close, I guess.

Quite a few interesting matters illustrated by this video other than its over-the-top awesomeness.

First off, it showcases nationalities, specifically the Yi
nationality of the Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture.As I point out in the video, a theme of the
gala was the synergies between national harmony, strength, and prosperity, not
a terribly unwelcome message as the United States descends into rancor and
polarization that brings to mind the Cultural Revolution. As I see it, the message of the gala was that
the best future for minorities lies in whole-hearted integration with
big/strong/rich Mother China, and Hong Kong and Macau and Taiwan should weigh
the advantages pursuing that same path instead of independence/autonomy/impotent
resentful grumbling/whatnot.

Second, the singer, Jike Junyi.She’s ethnic Yi from Liangshan.It was not just a question of local girl
makes good and gets to perform in a titanic musical spectacle in her home town that gets
beamed to a global audience of close to one billion.

She’s a major pop star in China, not just because she has a
good set of pipes, but she’s being groomed for the cross-cultural icon/diva
role by China’s Mandopop industry.

I will confess, I didn’t know Mandopop was a thing until I
started reading up on Jike Junyi, but apparently the corporate and cultural
powers that be have decided that the PRC cannot rely on South Korean boybands
and potentially subversive Hong Kong Cantopop to besot the nation’s youth.

By now there is a well-oiled international machine the devoted
to the discovery, grooming, and promotion of global pop stars, exemplified by
South Korea’s SM Entertainment musical agency (and profiled in John Seabrook’s
book The Song Machine).In female diva-dom, the process is well
represented by Rihanna, who couldn’t sing very well but blew them away at her
audition with her devastatingly chic turnout (which she had spent half the
night agonizing over) and regal demeanor.

Jike Junyi’s breakthrough moment came on The Voice of China, which is basically The Voice in China, a competitive
audience-vote-driven talent show.

The song that won the audience’s heart was Jike Junyi’s
rendition of a plaintive Yi folksong paired with…paired with…well, I’ll just
show you:

Jike Junyi didn’t win the overall competition, placing third,
but she did establish a strong, winning presence and a good look that, I’m
guessing, like Rihanna’s, could serve as raw material for the diva machine.Interestingly, she wasn’t even the only Yi
singer in the competition.Alu Azhuo, a
successful Yi ethnicity singer who was more of an ingénue type, did well, but
not as well as Jike Junyi.

Maybe a bakeoff to find a minority popstar was going on, and
Jike Junyi was perceived as the coolsexysassy type who could wear the diva
mantle…and also, interestingly, checked the “dusky” box for, not so much for minority
exoticism as her ability to bestow cool transnational/transracial cred on her
largely Han audience.

She is now in the hands of TH Entertainment and has the full
retinue of career managers, songwriters, producers, stylists, and whatnot tasked
with giving a diva’s career escape velocity.

Her tanned skin color and passionate personality
also made her a favorite of the fashion industry. She was featured on the cover
of the Chinese edition of Vogue magazine soon after she won third place in The
Voice of China.

Lucia Liu, one of China's most
prominent fashion stylists, who is the style director of Harper's Bazaar China,
has been working closely with Jike after she signed on with TH Entertainment in
early 2013. Liu will also design the costumes for Jike's upcoming concert,
which, as she describes, will be eye-catching and cutting-edge.

"I am quite inspired by her skin
color, which balances the clothes I chose for her," says Liu, who works
between Beijing and London. "We are also good friends. She really likes
eating hotpot."

In one of her hits, Colorful Black,
Jike sings, "I have dark skin, an intuitive soul and I stick to my color.
It doesn't matter how you look at me. You will see my colorful black."

"I used to hate my skin
color," giggles Jike, who, like many Chinese young women, was obsessed
with white skin tone. She bought lots of whitening toners, but all failed to
work.

"Now, I love my skin color
because it makes me special. I guess that is my natural gift, like
singing," she says.

Her
aspirations to post-racial vanguard status were announced by the adoption of an
English-language handle, “Summer” and a trip to Los Angeles to record a duet
paired with…paired with…well, I’ll just have to show you.

This video is, by the way, a G thing not as
in G for gangsta, but G for General Audiences.There are obviously still limits to the lengths PRC popstars will go in
their quest for global R&B cred.

The next what the
actual f*ck moment in Jike Junyi’s career was appearance in a
Western-Chinese movie coproduction entitled Outcast
in which her role was, in the immortal words of her publicity machine, “starring
as the dumb wife of Hollywood star Nicolas Cage”.

Ahem.“Mute” wife,
please.

Outcast was an
early (2014) entry in the burgeoning “Western medieval warrior transplanted to China”
genre (no, seriously, that’s also the premise of that The Great Wall movie with Matt Damon you’ve been seeing all the
posters for). In the movie, the bad guys
cutting out the tongue of Jike Junyi’s character (mercifully a pre-existing condition, not an action beat, perhaps to spare Jike the burden of wrestling with English dialogue) serves
as fuel for Cage’s intense feelings of grievance.

You can see the movie now on Netflix.It was absolutely flayed by critics but
whatever.Mysteriously, the movie missed
out on the big China payday it was undoubtedly banking on as suddenly,
literally days before it was going to open in 5000 Chinese theaters, the PRC
government yanked it without explanation.Maybe the Chinese government said, What?! You put her in the movie and
she’s not singing? Get outta here!

In any case, Jike Junyi got the prize job of singing the
theme song for the mainland Mandarin language release of the Disney animated
feature Moana.I feel pretty confident the Chinese
government won’t yank that one.

Moving beyond Mandopop, let’s dig into that song that Jike
Junyi belted out at the gala.

It’s a fifty year old
chestnut, 情深谊长，which can be translated as Deep Love and Eternal Friendship or, more simply, Friendship.The song was popularized by the dance opera The East is Red, which presented the
official history of the victory of the Chinese Communist Party to Chinese
audiences, first as a song/dance/drama stage extravaganza, and then as a legendary
film released in 1964.

Friendship commemorates
a key episode in the Long March when Liu Bocheng, on behalf of the Communist
forces, shared chicken blood in a ritual with an Yi chief to form a bond of blood
brotherhood and obtain safe passage through Yi lands.The chorus, "The Red Army are our brothers" pretty much says it all. You can see why the song would be a slam dunk
for Jike Junyi at the 2017 gala.

Here’s how the song originally appeared in the movie, as
sung by Deng Yuhua (who interestingly continues the ethnic theme by being, if
not Yi, Manchu):

I apologize for the quality.Criterion ought to do a restoration/rerelease number on this one.

The East is Red is
fondly remembered as a piece of idealistic kitsch from the pre-Cultural
Revolution days that gave China the title song as its de facto anthem during
the Mao years and provided the soundtrack for the lives of a generation of PRC
citizens.When I first came to Beijing,
the PTT clock tower on Changan Jie still tolled the hours using the
melody.Ah, memories!

Unfortunately, The
East is Red was also a key step in the establishment of the Mao Zedong
personality cult and, when viewed in retrospect, a disturbing harbinger of the
impending Cultural Revolution.

The title song, The
East is Red, was written in the 1940s.Mao loved it, for obvious reasons:

The east is red, the sun is rising.
From China comes Mao Zedong.
He strives for the people's happiness,
Hurrah, he is the people's great saviour!

And so on.There’s a
video of the movie version lower down in the post.It looks and sounds much worse on film than
it does on paper.

Greenlighting a stage extravaganza titled The East Is Red wasn’t the case of the Chinese Communist Party, by an
act of unanimous acclamation, giving a grateful shout-out to the guy who kicked
Chiang Kai-shek’s ass and handed China to the CCP.

In the 1950s, General Peng Dehuai had refused to permit the
singing of The East is Red in the PLA
as too cultish, which no doubt contributed to Mao’s feeling that
Peng was “China’s Khrushchev” angling to tear down “China’s Stalin”.

So the decision to commemorate the 15th
anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China with a big big
show titled The East is Red was a big
political statement, more like Mao throwing down the gauntlet.

And Mao’s gauntlet-wrangler in chief was none other than
Zhou Enlai.

I am deeply, heck, exclusively indebted in the following
discussion to an article by Hon-Lun Yang, Unravelling
The East Is Red (1964): Socialist Music and Politics in the People’s Republic
of China.The article appears in a
collection Composing for the State: Music
in Twentieth Century Dictatorships (Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga,
Manuel Deniz Silva, Routledge, 2016).Yang draws on some reminiscences by participants in the stage and film
production recently published in China.

Yang traces the roots of TEIR back to North Korea.Apparently, cast of thousands Arirang style spectaculars were already
a fixture in the DPRK in 1960 (interesting point in the China/Korea cultural parity debate, no?); a Chinese Air Force general was suitably
impressed by a 3000-person performance in North Korea and came back and mounted
a similar effort in China, which subsequently morphed into a Party-centric (as
opposed to Mao-centric) effort in Shanghai.

Zhou grabbed the Shanghai show, Under the Banner, and directed its Mao-ization as The East Is Red in a two-month crash
program.

[S]everal participants
claimed that Zhou’s ideological guidance was a crucial factor in the creative
process, and that his instructions saved them the trouble of deciding what the ‘correct’
political stance was and what details of the history of the CCP to include.

For one thing, the Nanchang Uprising (which marked the first
significant action of the PLA after the split with the KMT and whose
anniversary, August 1, is commemorated as Army Day in the PRC) was downplayed
since Mao wasn’t there (and Zhou Enlai was! Smart career/survival move, Zhou,
to avoid upstaging Mao!); instead, Mao’s
Autumn Harvest Uprising, a rather half-assed exercise that took place a few
weeks later, was pumped up in the narrative.

Further, Zhou directed that major play be given to the Zunyi
Conference, whose dramatic attributes were pretty limited (guys sitting around
in chairs) and subject matter kind of fraught (internal Party strife) but marked the key inflection point in revolutionary history, at
least for Mao, as he faced down his opponents and seized direction
of the CCP.

Per Yang:

Zhou was…reported to
have insisted the Zunyi Conference on stage despite the initial doubts of some
members of the artistic team…In the end, the image of the conference site was
projected on the screen, the meeting was represented with a dance, and its
meaning explained by means of a recitation.

Zhou didn’t stop with micromanaging the scenario.He also paid close attention to the staging,
directing modifications to the auditorium to accommodate a massive 1000-voice
choir, getting carpets installed on stage for the acrobats, handling personnel
matters, and attending numerous rehearsals.Zhou also was involved in meetings related to the movie version.

Zhou was apparently universally revered by the talent
putting on TEIR, and Yang credits Zhou with using the show to showcase, legitimize,
and thereby shield artists and artistic concepts from attack by the culture
warriors constellated around Jiang Qing.Having Western-instrument and Chinese-instrument sections in the
orchestra pit is presented as an example of Zhou’s solicitude.

For posterity--and in the eyes of the Party leadership at
the time--I doubt that was the message received.

Consider the reaction of Party members—many of whom felt a
deep sympathy with Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao’s excesses, including his
disastrous pursuit of the Great Leap Forward, and were finally seeing some
daylight after years of struggling with the crisis Mao had dumped on them—to take
their seats in the concert hall to be confronted with a 1000-person choir and
musical troupe roaring out song after song in one-sided praise of Mao Zedong.Then consider the jamboree had been personally
staged by party elder and premier political weathervane Zhou Enlai to lay down the popular and cultural line
concerning the unique and unassailable stature of Chairman Mao.

The Nuremberg-rallyesque overkill is well captured in the movie’s
opening.There’s a couple minutes of
framing/overture, so you can pretend you’re going into the Great Hall of the
People just like a citizen of Beijing in 1964 to catch this mind-blowing
perf!Be patient: the song The East Is Red starts at
about the 2:15 mark and it’s worth waiting for.

Since the subtitles cut out toward the end of the song, if you're keeping score it's one verse praising the CCP, three extolling Mao, including the big finish about Chairman Mao being the people's savior that I quoted above.

Then consider passages like the dramatic narrative of the Zunyi
Conference, describing how Mao took down internal doubters and enemies inside
the Party:

Revolution marches on
victoriously.The red base areas
flourish.But opportunists lead the revolution
down the wrong path.Once again, the
cause of the people is endangered.In
this critical moment, the Zunyi Conference, like the red sun disperses the
heavy fog.Mao Zedong, our great
helmsman, puts the ship on the right course.

The Zunyi sequence comes in at the 41:00 mark.

It doesn’t get much more cult-of-personality-ish than the end of
the Zunyi sequence, when the fourth wall is broken and an image of Mao on an
immense red flag becomes an object of universal veneration by the actors on
stage, the audience in the theater, and the viewers in the cinema.

Clever move by Wang Ping, a stage actress turned
revolutionary turned one of the era’s most accomplished film directors.

And those pictures of evil landlords getting led off-stage
in dunce caps for a taste of revolutionary justice…

If I was a Party member not in favor with Mao, after the
Zunyi sequence I’d be, you know, packing my toothbrush…

The song The East is
Red doesn’t appear too often in China today since it is an utterly
unapologetic Maoist artifact.

Friendship is, by
comparison, ubiquitous.Maybe because
the song—which was composed in 1962 by Zang Dongsheng for a military revue in
Shandong and was
pulled in during a TEIR brainstorming session wrestling with a shortage of
musical material covering the Long March—celebrates the achievement of Deng
Xiaoping’s close associate Liu Bocheng, and not Mao.

But also, I suspect, as Jike Junyi’s performance indicates,
it’s a kick-ass song.Deng Yuhua, who
sang it in the movie, had a big hit reprising Friendship
in 1995; and it’s been reworked as a highbrow chamber piece and
accompaniment to modern dance.

Even when it’s redone as the ultimate power ballad, Friendship still has echoes of the
terror and wonder of the Chinese revolution when it was still just a 15-year
old teenager.

*The producers didn’t think much of my proposed video cue
for the sequence, which would have run out the previous number to its
conclusion: a cheesy CGI dragon flying into the frame, then my oh so clever comment.Too laggy!Well, talent proposes, editor disposes.That’s how it goes!